[betterunix2]

Except that Jesus taught his disciples not to wash their hands before eating -- a basic hygenic practice that people of his time certainly understood. However valuable his moral teachings may have been, Jesus is not exactly an authority on preventing disease spread...

(Also, the story of Jesus and the leper may have been nothing more than an attempt to talk about Jesus' miraculous powers.)

[ekianjo]

> not to wash their hands before eating

if you dont have soap rinsing your hands with water that could be contaminated by a myriad of bacteria may not be the best course of action. Even in the modern world of less-developed countries, most gastrointestinal infections come from (unclean) water, not food.

[JetAlone]

You can wash your hands if you think it is wise to, but don't make it a matter of spiritual, ritual cleanliness that you place trust in the performance of above God as the pharisees did. As you say, God can make the water a worse poison to you.

Honour your father and mother. Be just to your neighbor. Trust God above man and cultivate a loving relationship with both. The modern day godless neo-pharisees will of course, as always, ask questions and make remarks that are trite, intended to discredit people's faith, or trip heartfelt believers into contradiction. They want to maintain the social order they're scared of having overturned by a just man willing to make a real sacrifice going against its grain in a sorely needed fashion. They don't understand, so be it.

[betterunix2]

You can also wash someone's feet if you want to, but don't make it a matter of spiritual, ritual cleanliness as Jesus did.

You can also take a bath if you want to, but don't make it a matter of spiritual, ritual cleanliness as Jesus did.

Also, Christians really need to learn what "pharisee" actually means before throwing the word around the way you do. "Neo-pharisees" would imply that the pharisees were some ancient group that ceased to exist at some point. In reality "pharisee" simple means "rabbi," and the only reason the term fell out of use is that the only recognizably Jewish movement to survive the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish-Roman wars was rabbinic Judaism. Almost any Jews you meet today practice a religion that can be traced directly to the pharisees mentioned in the New Testament. Moreover, the religious movement Jesus led was closer to what the pharisees taught and practiced than it was to any other Jewish movement of that time. One easy example is Jesus' own teaching that a man who has lustful thoughts about a woman has already committed adultery in his own heart; this is the kind of broadening of Jewish law that is common in rabbinic documents like the Talmud (e.g. "yichud," a prohibition on unmarried men and women being alone behind a closed door). Jesus also taught his followers answers to common Rabbinic debates, such as the famous dispute between Hillel and Shammai about when divorce is permitted.

Jesus was not nearly as radical as some Christians think. His movement was very slightly outside the mainstream, and for the most part his focus seems to have been on avoiding blind adherence to tradition. His willingness to accept disciples who were uneducated and even outcasts was unusual, but not that unusual, with the Talmud indicating that Rabbi Akiva was illiterate until he turned 40 and that Rabbi Shimon bar Lakish was the leader of a criminal gang before he began studying to be a rabbi (you may not believe such stories, but remember that the New Testament is no more historically reliable than the Talmud). Paul taught a religion that was much more radical than anything Jesus taught, but somehow I do not think you were referring to Paul when you spoke of "a just man willing to make a real sacrifice."

[alehander42]

Every interpretation which focuses on Jesus as a "interesting teacher" ignores half of the things he actually said and demonstrated. Paul wasn't more radical than the man who claimed to be greater than the Temple, one with the Father. Christ claimed that Abraham rejoiced for His day, Moses wrote for Him and the Scriptures pointed to Him.

He saw His own flesh as the bread of life, greater than the manna in the desert.

I am not sure we can easily comprehend how out there this was.

He resurrected people and died for the sins of every human. His teaching wasn't just a list of debates, but it was full of claims and events that you can't honestly compare to other "rabbies"

[ekianjo]

> Jesus was not nearly as radical as some Christians think

The whole thing about forgiveness, non-retaliation, redemption is very distinctive from usual Judaism though. That's one of the core aspects of Christianity.

[alexvoda]

Who is that "just man willing to make a real sacrifice going against its grain in a sorely needed fashion" threatening to overturn social order?

Also, hand washing is a matter of cleanliness period. Not spiritual cleanliness, not ritual cleanliness, not karmic cleanliness, not any other kind of something cleanliness. It is simple, ordinary, banal cleanliness.

[alehander42]

If you totally ignore the context of a text and read it in a way almost no one ever read it, you can give it any meaning you want

[alexvoda]

I am not ignoring context at all. The context was:

> The modern day godless neo-pharisees ...... want to maintain the social order they're scared of having overturned by a just man willing to make a real sacrifice .......

Who is this modern day man? JetAlone, who are you talking about? And who are his opponents?

[alehander42]

Just to clarify my comment, I was answering your second paragraph: it seemed to ignore to me the context of the original related Bible sections that started the discussion.

[cainxinth]

Soap was invented in 2800 BC

[ekianjo]

And you would be surprised that it was not routinely available everywhere, anytime, in antiquity. Mass consumption of soap is a very, very recent thing.

[cainxinth]

First hit from Google for “Did they use soap in biblical times?”:

>”Soap became hugely popular throughout the Roman Empire, around 100 BC to 400 AD. When the ruins of Pompeii were excavated, an entire soap factory was discovered in the rubble.”

[hajile]

He was rejecting ritual purification saying that your actions are more important. He agreed with all the requirements in the Torah, but not all the additional rituals gradually stacked on top (where the excessive ritual purification of his day fit).

Leprosy was viewed as a symbol of sin. This story was about Him touching a sinner and purifying them from that sin.

[betterunix2]

If that is true, why would Jesus have taught his disciples the spiritual value of ritual bathing and ritual foot washing?

[hajile]

Let's talk about Christian theology from that perspective

Jesus spoke sternly several times about the hypocrisy and burden of those artificial rules. He pointed out how they would "strain a gnat and swallow a camel" (straining their drinking water to avoid unclean animals while enjoying camel steaks which were unclean) or meticulously paying tithe of their little herbs while taking bribes and corrupting their legal judgements or promising their possessions to God so they could avoid honoring and taking care of their parents.

He talked about how they made the Sabbath a burden and the day of rest was made for the good of mankind rather than mankind being made slave to their onerous Sabbath rituals (eg, you couldn't go more than a certain distance, but if you went out before Sabbath and laid out parcels of food, you could go the distance, then stop at your "house" for a meal and then continue on).

If Jesus was indeed the Creator and Son of God, then His establishing a ritual would be very different from an ordinary man creating a ritual.

Jesus fulfilled the ceremonial laws when He died (becoming the literal death the symbol that the lamb pointed toward). This applied to the rest of the ceremonial laws (though not the Ten Commandments else sin could not exist as it is defined as the breaking of those laws).

In effect, the many daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly ceremonial rituals were swept away. Their replacements were a single baptism when one decided to follow Him and an occasional ("as often as you do this") ritual of humility (foot washing) followed by a ritual to remind of His death (communion).

[alexvoda]

Because the teachings of the Bible are not required to be coherent with eachother. It is detrimental if they are because it reduces the flexibility of interpretation. A good dogma, can always be interpreted favorably regardless of the situation.

A good dogma is like xkcd.com, you can always find a relevant quote for any given thing.

A rigid dogma can not, therefore it is a bad dogma, therefore it does not stand the test of time.

[alehander42]

this is a problem: your interpretations contradict.

Yes, if it was only about hygiene, this would seem strange. But the actual passages are more complex: and naturally, ignoring symbolism, ignoring the whole context, the huge difference between Law and human rules, the giant focus on sin in thousands of years of Scripture, Christ's ministry and the Law, Israel society, one can leap to any interpretation he wants.

We can also add James epistle , James 4:8-9: "Come close to God, and God will come close to you. Wash your hands, you sinners; purify your hearts, for your loyalty is divided between God and the world."

[alexvoda]

> one can leap to any interpretation he wants.

That is the very point of dogma beeing incoherent. Any interpretation can be derived. Therefore you need a profitable hierarchical beurocracy to tell the people the right interpretation. Every cult new and old has worked the same way.

[alehander42]

Not really. The Scripture is very good at showing what's in our heart: we have freedom to interpret some non-obvious things wrongly, to not put effort at actually understanding it and into deluding ourselves. However especially the Gospels have a lot of very obvious spiritual teachings.

But very often the truth reason that we don't like them is not because of our intelligence(you can find genius people believing in almost every kind of faith or ideology), but because of trauma, misunderstanding or the fact that often deep down we want to be our own gods, but we just end up being slaves to our own fragility and animal-like passions.

Hebrews 4:12

"For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it pierces even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart. "

(edit: also, my point is: if you ignore all the things you shouldn't ignore, it's easy to leap to wrong interpretations. you shouldn't ignore them! end of edit)

[alexvoda]

Since we are discussing religion, lets invoke the problem of evil and see what theodicy GP comes up with.

What kind of god, with the ability to completely cure a horrible disease with a simple gesture, instead goes arround and publicly heals a handful of people. How do you classify someone with the ability to eradicate a source of suffering, only making use of it for a few public appearances surrounded by those who will tell the tale.

And if you respond that it is not him that healed them, it is their faith, that faith has spread far and wide on all continents since then, yet the only progress humanity has made against Mycobacterium leprae, has been since sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccination (BCG vaccine) entered the stage.

Here is a chart about leprosy epidemiology in 2016: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprosy#/media/File%3ALepros...

It must be really nice living in a country where the threat of leprosy is closer to a myth than to an everyday topic. One in which you are not praying to a god each day to be shielded of the threat of leprosy or to be cured of it because you have better things to pray for.

I find it amazing how some human traits are so deep that people do not realise just how human, every single description of a god is. It is a monumental failure of imagination of what a god might be. And no wonder it is so. People before the enlightenment had far fewer sources to feed that imagination. And people after, found better uses of that imagination.

[alehander42]

God gives eternal life. In this case, the biggest problem we have isn't really sickness, or even physical death: it's separation from the Him: the Source of all that's actually good, and being enslaved to everything opposing Him.

Christ himself wasn't spared a brutal death in this life: many apostles and martyrs in a similar way, and this wasn't by accident. Earthly comfort or even health isn't the goal of christianity. Being re-united to God and stop being slaves to sin is more important: but this is a question of free will imho.

(as apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians: 1 For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. 2 Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling,..)

The faith doesn't make sense, if one believes only in the material world. It's central point is the Resurrection: "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied." (1 Cor 15:19)

[1] 1 Corinthians https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians...

[alexvoda]

What you stated is intended in perfect accordance with the Christian doctrine of various denominations. And if you can believe this, you will indeed live a happier more purposeful life. But not everyone can do that.

Unfortunately, this comment illustrates the issues with this line of thinking perfectly. There is no reason to strive to make life better for others or for one's self. The optimum Christian life optimises for the maximum confessed penance before death (but after baptism) in order to obtain salvation which is the optimum afterlife.

Precisely this overvaluation of afterlife and undervaluation of life results in this being called a death cult.

This is precisely why there is no empathy for the people who suffered from the pandemic. Millions died. Good for them.

[alexvoda]

To make it crystal clear, this is part of the comment that started this thread:

> But being scared of the air is certainly not something Jesus would have been.

In other words, a 76 year old man, 1 year away from retirement, the period of life one gets to reap the fruits of their labour, for whom Covid is not a mild cold, but most probably a matter of life and death, should grow some balls and behave like the omnipotent God.

It is crass.

Yet it is in accordance with Christian belief. Only a life of faith and penance after being baptized grants you a chance at salvation in the afterlife. One should face potential disease with courage, because one has faith in God. If it God's will, to die a quick death so be it. If it is God's will to survive unharmed for a few more years, so be it. If it is God's will to die a slow agonizing death, so be it.

I hope you can see how this line of thought can be nauseatingly repulsive to some people.

[alehander42]

I don't think any mortal human should behave as he is God. It's good to try to not get sick/prevent diseases.

However, you took this sense out of context: the context is "There is something worth non 0 value of living in a society who accepts you despite being sick or 'dirty', and is willing to take the risk of having those who are tainted amongst them. I feel that's an attitude that comes from a place of strength not weakness."

This is much more nuanced. Nobody should be forced to do this! And after all, it's someone's interpretation. The OT specifically instructed people for such diseases as you might know. Christ helped the sick not naively, but knowing he can heal them. Doing things naively is not always good.

The picture you draw sounds like a strawman of catholicism. Well, "The heart is deceitful above all things" says Jeremiah: our flesh is very proud and letting the ego go is extremely hard for it. However this is more similar to the frustration of a child wanting to create it's own society far away from parents and then going and living in the jungle in utter helplesness and self-delusion.

There is a paradoxical beauty in the eternal which is hard to even articulate and those materialistic arguments ring hollow. I can totally see how it might look like that, but I'd say it's a look from someone who haven't yet actually tasted the beauty of Christ and the faith, see the peace in the Word or the saints. I've been in a boat similar to yours many years(and yes, you can have read the Scriptures 10 times and led 200 discussions, information is just information)

[alexvoda]

So nice of you to backpaddle in the first 3 paragraphs. But the opening comment I critiqued was quite direct about the lack of Christian values of professor fearing Covid.

> The OT specifically instructed people for such diseases as you might know.

You just vindicated the professor. The students ar just as much vectors of disease as those lepers banished from the city were to the city city dwellers. The joys of incoherent dogma, you can always find an applicable quote.

Your 4'th paragraph is a space filler. Let me guess you are Eastern Orthodox. It is common for Eastern Orthodox to blame the Catholic heretics, or worse those Godless Protestants for all the bad reputation Christianity has among the non-religious. If only people knew the true Christianity, they would see the light.

As for your fifth paragraph, just no, to basically every sentence.

Excuse my sarcasm, but I really hoped you would be able to empathize with my previous comment and understand how awful the thread opener was, along with equally crass now deleted comments by podgaj and this comment by coldtea:

> On the other hand, this is life. You can die from 100 other ways, and in his age, he could die any moment anyway. At some point you soldier up and don't fuss like a baby over any danger.

Or this one by tokai:

> I rather get paid without having to work and taking any risk of illness, than doing my job and providing the students with the teaching they have paid for?

Have you maybe considered that maybe the professor is not a Christian. Maybe he is a Jew and behaving according to scripture by keeping their distance from people who are potential carriers of disease. Maybe their religion is none of our business and we should not assume strangers should behave as saints and judge them for not doing so. It truly is upsetting that pointing out the vitriol thrown towards him has failed elicit any trace of empathy towards him. And if entitled vitriol is bad, religiously moralistic vitriol is the worst.

[alehander42]

It is about the actual purpose of the Law and it references ritual purification. It's about human traditions vs God's Law. We don't need to wash our hands as a spiritual ritual before eating, we absolutely can wash them if it makes sense to wash them, e.g. hygiene.

Read Mark 7:

1 The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus 2 and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. 3 (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4 When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.[a]) 5 So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”

larger second EDIT:

The focus is of course, spiritual, and it is on the actual things that defile people, for example:

20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. 21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”

[JetAlone]

I tried to explain this too, but these airwaves are sadly dominated by people vehemently motivated to buttress the narrative that Christians are or should be against any form of hand washing if they were consistent. I think this case (among others) would be a pretty good litmus test to root out people who don't want to understand and, however intelligent or civil, are just not emotionally ready to discuss it.

I can understand to some degree why they act as they do; they honestly think lots of people will tragically die and have their rights trampled on if they don't generate enough apostasy or prevent enough conversions to deter the Christian worldview from regaining enormous appeal. Being an anti-christian culture warrior feels rewarding. I should know, I used to be one. The simple matter I eventually discovered as I got older is, there is no life, no justice, no joy, no freedom, no rights, no good, nothing worth having without a sincere relationship with the Creator of all these things. I can't just generate these virtues and hoard them for myself, they ultimately came from something greater than me.

[alexvoda]

For your first paragraph, the airwaves are not filled with anything. There is no narrative that Christians are or should be against hand washing. Betterunix2 made a comment referencing an unrelated passage showing intentionally poor hygiene in order to reject the idea that the fearlessness of God in the presence of a human disease should be a guidline for behaviour in the current behaviour. People are not God, and are rightfully afraid of disease.

That passage is about how action is more important than ritual. That ritual was built on superstitions which were built on observations that cleanliness resulted in better life outcomes. Over time people forgot the reasons behind the (healthy) ritual. The moral of that passage is that interpersonal behaviour is more important for salvation than conformance to rituals. It is replacing one superstition.

On the other hand, in a paralel thread, you are pushing that very idea you are complaining about.

> You can wash your hands if you think it is wise to, but ...... God can make the water a worse poison to you.

[betterunix2]

Christianity already has enormous appeal, it is literally the most widely practiced religion in the world. I never said Christians are against hand washing, I said that Jesus taught his disciples, who lived before Christianity was a religion (if you asked the disciples what they practiced they would have all said "Judaism"), that they need not wash their hands before eating. This is recorded in the gospels, so if you have some kind of problem with it then your argument is not really with me.

I also take issue with the idea that there is no joy or value in life unless someone has a "sincere relationship" with the Christian deity. There are plenty of happy, healthy, and fulfilled atheists, not to mention the many polytheists and idolaters who live equally fulfilling, joyous, and righteous lives. You do not have to agree with how anyone else approaches life, but to claim that only the Christian deity can bring meaning, worth, freedom, or good to a person's life is the darkest worldview I can imagine. Christianity is the world's most popular religion but the majority of the world is not Christian. Do you actually think that non-Christians live depressing lives dominated by evil and unjust practices?

[JetAlone]

Any virtuous things non-Christians have ultimately come from God. Non-Christians' lives, like anyone else's, are dominated by whatever they choose or allow to. What they do lack (in varying degrees) is vision and faith acting like a compass to regularly re-direct their lives completely towards the source of all good. Willfully serving a passion for anything other than God is the archetype of any unjust practice, which necessarily self-inflict meaningless pain. Honesty, humility and love naturally act as pointers to better temperaments and a truer faith which in their fullness will bring one to accept Christ's sacrificial love which destroyed death for all human beings, and seek His Church. This choice begins a long, perilous struggle to be united with God.

For today, I pray that you and yours will not imagine nor try to imagine any worldview darker than the Gospel for the entire day, for there is none brighter.

[alexvoda]

JetAlone, your second paragraph is a tipical example of why nonchristians find it unpleasant to engage in discussions, especially on religious topics, with devout Christians. I do not believe there is a way to convey to you what a nonchristian feels reading that second paragraph.

[alehander42]

Today's judaism is very different from Second Temple judaism. My impression is that it is probably more different from it than some forms of Christianity, e.g. Eastern Orthodoxy. It seems that it has evolved as a reaction against Christianity and morphed into a very different religion.

Also, no, this is not the message in the Gospel. Here is an example commentary of the scene if you actually want some context: https://biblehub.com/commentaries/ellicott/matthew/15.htm

[betterunix2]

"It seems that it has evolved as a reaction against Christianity"

Citation needed.

Pretty much all secular scholarship I have ever seen on this topic has concluded that both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity were reactions to the destruction of the second temple. Rabbinic Judaism is the direct intellectual and religious descendant of the pharisee sect, and has always stood on its own merits. The only rabbinic tradition that definitively developed in response to the rise of Christianity is the birkat haminim, a prayer that was used to "out" secret Jewish Christians before the final split between the religions. Beyond that, all there is are attempts to deal with / respond to persecution of Jews and Jewish institutions by Christians in later centuries (e.g. the fixing of the Jewish calendar after Christian Rome disbanded the Sanhedrin).

Don't overstate the importance of Christianity to the early rabbis. Rabbinic literature is generally dismissive of non-Jewish religions and Jewish Christians like the Ebionites were seen as heretics -- a term the rabbis used for non-rabbinic Jewish movements of the Roman era (of which there were many, none of which have survived).

As for the Gospel, it does not really matter what people thought hand washing was for -- ritual washing hands did improve their hygiene, just like ritual bathing. Jesus told his followers not to bother, and it does not matter whether or not he understood the hygiene implications, because not washing their hands was still detrimental to hygiene.

[alehander42]

He wasn't talking about the hygiene of washing hands. He is God, he understood. He was making an obvious point about human traditions a which the Gospels even clarify with context.

The Scripture is full of similar scenes. Peter sees a vision with a sheet with unclean animals ready for eating. The focus was on evangelizing the people who eat those foods tho: the gentiles.

The destruction of the Second Temple was prophesied by Christ, and apostles started serving in the Church only 50 days after His resurrection, on Pentecost. So yes, rabbinical judaism has been a reaction to the destruction of the second temple, but the Church was already active and persecuted in the center of the roman empire, many epistles were already written and there were churches through greece and rome

[alexvoda]

> It seems that it [Judaism] has evolved as a reaction against Christianity and morphed into a very different religion.

That line of thought will not lead to a good place.

[alehander42]

Why? Rabbinical judaism is not the same as the Second Temple faith. Research its history and if it preserved the same interpretation of OT

[betterunix2]

Well, did Jesus tell his follows that they should not be hypocrites who wash their hands because they blindly follow traditions and that they should instead wash their hands because it is good for their health? No, he simply taught them not to bother washing hands before eating.

Moreover, Jesus is recorded elsewhere as having taught his disciples a practice of ritual foot washing (involving washing another person's feet), which remains a practice among some Christians to this very day. He even went on to explicitly indicate that foot washing is spiritually important. Jesus also taught his followers to practice a form of ritual bathing, clearly given spiritual significance and clearly a variation of Jewish ritual bathing, that remains widely practiced by Christians today: baptism. So, if we accept the account of the gospels, it would seem that Jesus was not really opposed to washing rituals in general, nor to treating ritualized washing as a matter of spiritual significance, he just had a different concept than the mainstream Rabbinic tradition.

[alehander42]

I mean, it's simply very strange to read this through the lens of some kind of "rules of hygiene" outlook. Nobody took it that way: jews weren't some kind of naive children, traditions and rituals were deeply embedded in their culture. The gospel account gives the actual context and explicitly shows it has nothing to do with hygiene. He never tells them not to wash their hands: I've had OCD so at least to me it's painfully obvious it's more like "don't do X hoping this will clean your soul", they explicitly talk of defiling which is a spiritual concept.

Christ was not against the concept of God's ceremonial rules/law: after all, He was the one instituting it in the beginning, my understanding is that He was against hypocrisy and burdening people with custom rabbinic rules instead of focusing on the spirit of the Law.

You can just take a look at the excess of some modern rabbinical judaism ceremonial rules for proof.

Again: it's very hard for me to understand how you can read those passages with such a strange mindset: material things were often just shortcuts to spiritual conversations, they already had thousands of years of Scripture in that direction

[alexvoda]

The point of the hygiene optic is just that. The all knowing, all powerful, all loving God incarnate by definition should know all about hygiene and germs and quantum gravity and Pokemon and Covid and everything, by definition.

Yet, instead of teaching people about hygiene, God chooses to condemn the world to 1500+ years of easily preventable infantile death and all other kinds of suffering. Because, don't worry, afterlife is awesome, unless you go to hell like most people.

[alehander42]

A soul is infinitely more important than a temporal sickness and God is infinitely more merciful and wise than our limited capacity/knowledge can comprehend. And yes, Christ came to destroy death on the Cross: and yet, before His resurrection He lived through every joy and pain other humans do. And I am glad that He did gave His words of Life, flesh and blood, instead of a biology textbook.

John 3:16-21 "16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God."

[alexvoda]

As I said elsewhere, he just replaced one superstition with another superstition.

You are correct that the meaning of that passage is to critique hypocrisy, but in doing so, the nugget of actually valid advice that was accidentally embedded inside a superstition, was extirpated.

Jews 2000 ago, did not have notions of sanitation. They did not have germ theory. They happened to stumble upon a healthy practice and superstitions were built around that practice. They never had statistics or the scientific method to determine the effect of washing hands. Someone simply did so, managed to avoid some disease, then told others that by doing so managed to stay in God's grace. And so, a healthy practice became a ritual. Time passed and the origin of the ritual was forgotten. Jesus comes, and rightfully tells everyone that said ritual is irrelevant for God. Instead here is a bunch of other different superstitions.

[alehander42]

All of this is really not very relevant to the New Testament. Sadly I feel people back then had in some ways a better grasp of symbolism, proverbs and Scripture than us today.